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Empaths in a burning era
One day, the country slipped into the wrong hands and the rest is…making history. Not the kind you frame. Not the kind you teach with pride. The kind you read about later and whisper, we should’ve known. My generation has never felt anything like this. Not even after September 11. And that’s saying something because that day felt like the sky itself had been ripped open. Literal doom broadcast live. But here’s the part that unsettles me most: back then, I felt everything. Now, I often feel numb, as if my system forces itself to restart. That frightens me. I’m one of the most outspoken people among my peers, and…
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What bores me, you ask?
I saw a writing prompt on this blogging platform earlier today. The question was simple: What bores you? For me, that’s an easy one. My answer has never wavered: routine. Nothing — and I do mean nothing — drains the color out of life faster than having identical days stacked neatly on top of each other like those sad beige file folders. And the ironic part? I am, in fact, living a near-perfect replica of the same day, five times a week. Same schedule, same obligations, same annoying alarm clock every morning. There was a time when I was an expert at escaping monotony. I could afford to be spontaneous.…
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Breathing is labor: one of those days
One of those days when the song on the radio brings back time and it stays and every shed tear, every far-off laughter returns like a ghost from a former chapter. One of those days when my mother’s voice in my memory sways; all her quiet wars, her calloused grace, still a warrior, her love I held dear yet too often misplaced. One of those days when no word you offer can alter my haze as I name myself a failure, a field gone dry, where seeds of dreams fell but forgot how to rise. One of those days when I’d welcome the arms that once dealt me pain for…
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I won’t call it love if it isn’t
So it’s Valentine’s Day — a day I’ve grown estranged from, as if it belonged to a language I once spoke fluently and have since forgotten. I scroll past the declarations, the curated tenderness, the proof-of-love posts by couples, and feel an involuntary irony rise in me. Just wait until the blindfold comes off, I think. Not cruelly but with the weary realization of someone who has mistaken dim light for dawn before. It isn’t that I don’t believe in love. It’s that the loves I’ve lived inside have always come up short — reaching toward me, but never quite arriving. I wasn’t always like this. There was a time…
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Blind love, loud excuses: a teacher’s perspective
As a child-less teacher, I’ve had a front-row seat to the many ways parenting shows up in children’s behavior. Behaviors teachers see that parents often don’t. In my nearly 16 years working in education, I’ve seen it all — the gentle, the challenging, and everything in between. Everyone loves and admires a well-behaved child. It’s instinctive. And whenever I encounter one, my first silent nod of appreciation goes to the parents because good discipline, respect, and empathy start at home. What I want to talk about, though, is not good behavior but the opposite: deeply disrespectful children, and the adults who defend them at all costs. It isn’t true that…
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Reflection on cruelty and obedience
Roughly six million Jews. Six million Jews were exterminated by Nazi Germany. Ever since I learned this as a young girl; ever since I can remember, one question persists: How did no one stop it sooner? How was this even possible? How did so many people simply obey? It felt implausible that a human being could go home at night and fall into a peaceful sleep after inflicting so much suffering. Inconceivable that an entire army could agree to carry out one egotistical, despicable, small man’s wish. How did so many people just… agree? How did cruelty become routine? How did obedience outweigh conscience? And yet, for a long time,…
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Mean every word
Every word on here is or once was a piece of me. I mean what I say. I write what I mean. Some stories get twisted in the mix. But I always come back to me. It always comes back to me. One of the hardest parts of wearing your heart on your sleeve is you expect honesty from everyone you meet. You assume that vulnerability will be mirrored, that speaking your truth will invite truth tellers; that someone will handle your unvarnished feelings with the same care. Well, it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes people take your openness as an invitation, and sometimes they take it as an…
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Late to the drama party but never late to the commentary
My first blog post of 2026 is a rather trivial one. With so much unhappiness going on, I thought I’d keep it light. So let’s jump right in. The thing is this: I am not much of a television buff. When faced with the choice between doing chores, creating something, or being lazy on the couch, the latter is almost never an option. I have to be under strict doctor’s orders, exhausted beyond reason, or maybe just a little depressed to sit down in front of a TV on purpose. And last month, that’s exactly what happened. I couldn’t lift a finger due to sickness. So I forced myself to…
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The turning of years
With the turning of the year comes the weight of reflection. Silent, yet inevitable. Today I think of the quiet goodbyes, and the loud ones that echoed through 2025, like whispers in a rainstorm. Even when doubt clouds my heart, I wonder if endings are tethered to some unseen reason, a thread woven too fine to see, but which pulls us in ways we don’t understand The way the universe spins with purpose, sometimes sharp, sometimes soft; strategically breaking hearts, strategically mending us, it’s hard to tell if we’ll ever know what (if any) good reasons it may have. But I’ve learned that one has to learn to let go.…
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The weight of knowing
What’s worse? Being hit all at once unexpectedly or being hit after having had the chance to brace for impact? Being blindsided is quite impactful, but being proven right can also have a strong kind of reckoning. It is frankness vs betrayal. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to choose how we’d like to be “wounded” because everything would flow in a gentler way. But it is not a perfect world. Sometimes, we’re caught off guard…even after knowing what’s coming. And transitioning from that limbo can be challenging, regardless of whether we’d been warned or not But somewhere between those two, lies the quiet ache of truth; the truth we…
